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Metapopulation ecology has become a popular concept
in terrestrial and limnic environments and receives in-
creasing attention in coastal waters. During a workshop
held from 26 to 30 September 2001 at the Alfred Wege-
ner Institute, Wattenmeerstation Sylt, we tried to explore
to what extent metapopulation theory helps to answer
questions on the spatial and temporal structure of marine
organisms. Volume 57, part 1 of Helgoland Marine Re-
search contains papers presented during this workshop.
The first paper, by Grimm et al., gives an introduction to
metapopulation theory and summarises the extensive dis-
cussions that took place during the workshop. The main
finding was that the usefulness of the metapopulation
concept lies in the questions that are asked when the
concept is applied; in other words, when the metapopula-
tion concept is a working hypothesis with the concept
being explicitly defined, and with questions clearly
linked to the concept.
We gratefully acknowledge the help of our students in
organising the workshop and of several experts in re-
viewing manuscripts.
W. Armonies (
✉
) · M. Strasser · K. Reise
Guest editors, Wattenmeerstation Sylt,
Alfred-Wegener-Institut für Polar- und Meeresforschung,
25992 List, Germany
e-mail: warmonies@awi-bremerhaven.de
Tel.: +49-4651-956138, Fax: +49-4651-956200
Helgol Mar Res (2003) 56:221
DOI 10.1007/s10152-002-0120-4
EDITORIAL
W. Armonies · M. Strasser · K. Reise
“The metapopulation concept in coastal waters”: preface
Published online: 7 November 2002
© Springer-Verlag and AWI 2002